Finding Common Ground: An Eco-Collaborative Practice

As a member of the conference committee for the Nature Connection Conference 2025, I find myself in the midst of thinking and planning for a proposed workshop contribution. In this reflective space, I am drawn to contemplate the evolving intersections between the Five Pathways to Nature Connectedness: senses, emotion, meaning, beauty, and compassion, and the eco-sensitive collaboration that continues to unfold between myself as a dancer, Sabine Kussmaul as a visual artist, and Scott Thurston as a poet and dancer. Our shared practice, which explores site-sensitive, embodied, and interdisciplinary modes of engagement with place and the more-than-human, is the generative ground from which this blog post emerges.

Finding Common Ground on Bakestonedale Moor

Toward a Kinesthetic Cartography of Nature Connection

Amid escalating ecological disconnection and the accelerating pace of everyday life, the need to cultivate practices of attentional depth, reciprocity, and place-based attunement becomes not merely a creative concern but an ethical imperative (Ingold, 2011; Abram, 2010). The upcoming Finding Common Ground workshop, facilitated by myself, Professor Scott Thurston, and Dr Sabine Kussmaul, is situated within this call to reorient our relational capacities through an ecosomatic inquiry that integrates movement, poetic attention, and embodied ‘drawing’ in space as a means to deepen kinaesthetic connection with self, others, and the more-than-human world.

The workshop is grounded in the framework of the Five Pathways to Nature Connectedness (Lumber, Richardson & Sheffield, 2017), which identifies senses, emotion, meaning, beauty, and compassion as primary relational filters through which humans experience and affirm connection with the natural world. These dimensions are not conceptual endpoints, but portals through which perception, participation, and ecological responsibility may be co-enacted in real time.

Through shared improvisational tasks, site-responsive engagement, and somatic-reflective processes, participants of the practice are invited into a co-creative space where movement becomes not simply expressive, but relationally situated, what Manning (2009) might term “preacceleration,” the micro-political terrain in which thought and action co-emerge.

Mapping Connection: A Conceptual Ecology

To support the workshop’s relational approach, we have developed a conceptual map that links the Five Pathways to Nature Connectedness to a broader ecology of attentional and epistemic practices – an idea I have previously grappled with in an earlier blog. At the map’s centre are three interwoven methodologies: deep listening, slow looking, and deep mapping, which function not as tools in a conventional sense, but as ontological orientations. These practices mirror what Tsing (2015) refers to as “arts of noticing,” where attentional discipline opens possibilities for relational reconfiguration.

Deep listening (Oliveros, 2005) engages the auditory field not simply as input but as invitation, where listening becomes a modality of care and co-presence.

Slow looking (Tuan, 1979; Shusterman, 2012) reclaims observation from the extractive gaze, insisting on duration, patience, and sensory reciprocity.

Deep mapping (Pearson & Shanks, 2001; Roberts, 2016) enables layered, polyvocal engagements with place, bringing together cartographic, affective, and performative dimensions in a non-linear field of spatial storytelling.

Radiating from these modalities are relational acts and concepts: navigation, collaboration, care, trust, construction, framing, and opening attention, which we position as both outcomes of, and conditions for meaningful ecological connection. Each of these can be traced through the embodied filters of the Five Pathways to Nature Connectedness. For instance:

Senses support the opening of attention and spatial navigation through the immediacy of texture, rhythm, and materiality (Sheets-Johnstone, 2011). The role of multisensory perception in shaping environmental experience is now widely acknowledged in both environmental psychology and embodied cognition research. Studies suggest that the integration of sensory inputs, particularly visual, auditory, tactile, and proprioceptive cues, enhances not only spatial orientation but also emotional resonance with place (Kolarik et al., 2023; Diaconu, 2022). In the context of nature connectedness, Lumber et al. (2017) identify sensory engagement as a key pathway, arguing that direct, embodied contact with natural elements fosters attentional depth and relational awareness. These findings resonate with embodied ecological approaches that understand perception not as passive reception but as active participation in a more-than-human field of relationality (Richardson, Passmore, Lumber & Thomas, 2020).

Emotion underpins trust and relational vulnerability, creating conditions for co-affective presence (Levine, 2017). Emotions are not merely internal states but operate relationally, shaping the dynamics of attention, reciprocity, and trust-building (Nicol, 2021). Affect-based trust, for instance, has been shown to play a critical role in interpersonal and collaborative settings by enabling the emergence of shared vulnerability and deepened co-presence (Lee et al., 2023). In nature-based interventions, emotional engagement is central to fostering sustainable nature connectedness, with research demonstrating that affective responses to nature, such as awe, calm, and joy, enhance empathy and prosocial behaviour (Richardson, Sheffield, Harvey, & Petronzi, 2016; Lumber et al., 2017). Emotion, then, is both a mediator of connection and an embodied signal of belonging.

Meaning invites acts of narrative construction and shared signification, often emerging through place-based poetics and embodied metaphors. Meaning-making is understood in the nature connectedness literature as a key route through which individuals internalize and sustain environmental values (Richardson et al., 2020). Drawing on theories of embodied metaphor (Johnson, 2007; Lakoff & Johnson, 1999), recent cognitive and ecological studies reveal how bodily experiences in nature generate metaphoric associations that ground ethical and existential insights. For example, walking through a dense forest may be experienced not just as physical passage but as metaphor for resilience, complexity, or transformation. Such metaphorical processing is foundational to the creation of eco-poetic narratives and place-based identity, reinforcing the role of meaning as a narrative ecology (Raymond et al., 2013; Heintzman, 2012).

Beauty reframes the aesthetic as an ethical mode of perception - an invitation into attentiveness rather than consumption. Recent scholarship has positioned beauty not only as a cultural ideal, but as a relational ethic: O’Connell (2024) argues that aesthetic perception can generate moral insights, inviting a reorientation from passive appreciation to active care, while Widdows (2018) reconfigures beauty as an ethical ideal that shapes how we live and relate to others and the world. These perspectives challenge the commodification of aesthetic experience and instead affirm beauty’s generative potential for attentional and ethical engagement.

Compassion grounds the practice in care ethics, reinforcing mutuality and an expanded sense of response-ability. Building on feminist and posthumanist scholarship, this response-ability (Haraway, 2016), is not just the ability to respond, but the cultivated willingness to do so in ethically entangled and situated ways. It calls us into practices of staying with complexity, of making-with rather than knowing-about, and of refiguring care as a shared and risky act of becoming-with the more-than-human world.

Pathway	Relational concepts	Epistemic act	Situated in…
Senses	Opening Attention, Navigation (of terrain)	Embodied awareness, sensory grounding	Slow Looking & Deep Mapping
Emotion	Trust, Care	Affective resonance, vulnerability	Deep Listening
Meaning	Construction, Framing/Being Framed	Narrative co-creation, cultural encoding	Deep Mapping
Beauty	Framing, Collaboration	Aesthetic encounter, shared perception	Slow Looking & Deep Mapping
Compassion	Care, Trust, Collaboration	Ethical relation, mutual recognition	Deep Listening & Deep Mapping

Workshop as Site of Inquiry

On the 16th June 2025, myself, Scott and Sabine will be introducing our enquiry to attendees of the Nature Connections Conference. Within Finding Common Ground, participants will engage in a series of structured yet emergent activities that explore these interrelations. As our practice entangles with the textures and atmospheres of the Cathedral Green, a purpose-built open performance space situated alongside the River Derwent and the Silk Mill, with the Cathedral as a backdrop in Derby City Centre, we explore how the landscape becomes not only context but co-constituent - an active participant in the choreography of attention. The pedagogical intention is not to arrive at closure or solution, but to inhabit a space of layered inquiry. What becomes possible when we sense with rather than about? When movement is framed not as expression but as dialogue? When artistic processes become conduits for ecological solidarity?

Concluding Provocation

In an era marked by sensory overload and rapid ecological change, this practice offers a modest but vital counter-gesture: to move more slowly, listen more deeply, and co-map our relational terrain with greater care. Here, the Five Pathways to Nature Connectedness are not merely heuristics, they are anchors for an embodied, ethical, and creative practice of becoming with place (Haraway, 2016).

To find common ground, we must first learn to feel the ground, and each other, anew.

References

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Heintzman, P., 2012. Spiritual outcomes of nature-based recreation. In: B. Van Hecke, ed. Outdoor recreation, health, and wellness: Linking people and places. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics, pp.127–140.

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